7 JUNE 1940, Page 6

The writer of a letter which reached me from New

York this week—an Englishman—mentioned that not long ago Major G. F. Eliot, generally recognised as the first military critic in the United States, said to him, " Why don't your people make more use of Ironside? Look at his God-given name." Well, we are making use now both of the man and the God-given name. There is both imagination and inspiration in the new application of the latter. The esprit de corps it promises to engender will express itself in terms of parachutists' lives, if the parachutists ever come. Nothing, moreover, could be more apt than the quotation from Croinwell. But Cromwellian quotations need to be handled warily. When a recent artiLie in one of Lord Beaverbrook's papers included a passage from Cromwell's address to his troops before Dunbar, Lord Beaver- brook, who is a son of the manse, demanded to know what the writer meant by traducing his Presbyterian forebears.

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